El Obeid Under the Drones: The Siege Playbook Moves to Kordofan's Capital
A near-daily drone campaign is knocking out power, water and hospitals in a city of half a million — the same sequence that preceded the El Fasher massacre, now running on North Kordofan.
The UN issued a "red alert" over El Obeid on July 3, warning up to 500,000 civilians risk large-scale atrocities; the UN human-rights chief flagged "relentless" drone strikes on July 20. Monitors documented roughly fifteen strikes in three weeks killing at least forty-five civilians and hitting power substations, fuel and water facilities and hospitals. Save the Children counted 5,500-plus children displaced in a two-week window. The SAF still holds the city, but the RSF now controls every route bar the eastern approach — El Obeid is the gateway linking central Sudan to the Darfur and Kordofan gold-and-oil belt.
Assessment: El Obeid is the strategic hinge of the central front. If it falls, the RSF joins its Darfur and Kordofan holdings into a contiguous western statelet, hardening a de facto partition and validating the facts-on-the-ground that are sinking the ceasefire talks. El Fasher established the template — siege, surrender, massacre — so that is now the realistic case here, not the worst one. Al Jazeera and MEE frame the siege as "UAE-backed"; treat that as contested attribution, and the physical test of whether Abu Dhabi's leverage buys restraint.